James Higgins wrote:
>
> We are playing with incredibly dangerous technology here. Not once have I
> seen the powers that be on this list stop and ask "should we do this?" You

Oh yeah, that old thing. We did that like 2 or 3 years ago. Sorry if it
seems rather old hat, and unthinking by this point. Do you really think
we would go to the trouble of forming SIAI, and do the things we are doing
if we weren't already convinced that we should do it? We have considered
all possible futures that we have come across or dreamed up, and this one
is the one that looks the best, and has the best chances of being achieve-
able. I guess if you really want to debate this again we do it, but we
pretty much demand you first go locate the previous discussions in the
Extropians archive and read up. There was also a thread on the FoRK list
last year when some other newbies took umbrage. It also may be mentioned
in Friendly AI, but the current version has grown so much in size I haven't
tried to read it yet. There are even discussions of this in the SL4 archive-
see: http://www.sysopmind.com/archive-sl4/0009/